Who is hitting Russia?

There are two plausible hypotheses about Friday’s terrorist attack at a concert hall outside Moscow, which killed at least 139 people.

The first is that it was a internal workorchestrated by Russian security services, or at least carried out with their prior knowledge.

The second is that it wasn’t like that.

In open societies, conspiracy theories are for crazy people.

In closed societies, they represent a reasonable (though not always correct) way of understanding political phenomena.

In 1999, more than 300 Russians were killed and 1,700 injured in a series of apartment bombings that authorities blamed on Chechen terrorists.

The attacks served as a pretext for Vladimir Putin – who had quickly risen from secondary apparatus to director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) and then to prime minister – launched the second Chechen war.

Then something strange happened.

Police found three huge bags of white powder in the basement of an apartment building in the city of Ryazan, linked to a detonator and a timer set to go off at 5:30 am.

Early tests on the gunpowder found that it contained the same explosive, hexogen, used in other attacks.

The police immediately arrested the culprits who had deposited the bags, and it turned out to be them FSB employees.

The Russian government later claimed that the bags were filled with sugar and had been left in the buildings as a training exercise.

But as historian David Satter and others have documented, the claim borders on the absurd.

And numerous journalists and politicians who tried to investigate what happened ended up poisoned or killed I’m shooting.

Antecedent

Why is this story important?

Because it shows that Putin “is not allergic to blood, Russian or any other kind, if spilling it helps his goals,” as Garry Kasparov pointed out in the Wall Street Journal.

Says something that Putin seemed to provide the motivation for a false flag attack by indicating almost immediately with the finger to Ukraine for Friday’s massacre:

an absurd but revealing choice of culprit, given that Ukraine would immediately destroy its credibility with Western partners if it had any connection to the event.

It also speaks volumes that the attack came soon after Putin’s re-election in this month’s sham election, and just as he sought to mobilize tens of thousands of fresh troops for the war in Ukraine.

What better way to do this than to resort to the tried and true formula of creation panic on the home front be able to bring destruction to the border?

This is the first hypothesis.

But there is also a brutal history of Islamic terrorism in Russia, and the United States alerted Moscow on March 7 (just as it alerted Iran before an attack by the Islamic State in January) that an attack was imminent.

In both cases, the warnings were ignored (Putin dismissed them as “an attempt to scare and destabilize our society”), perhaps because cynical regimes find it difficult to imagine the possibility of altruistic motivations.

Trial

This suggests what we already knew: Putin’s state is as incompetent as it is brutal.

And with the enemies he has, he does not need to invent a fictitious conspiracy between the Western powers and the “Nazi regime” in Kiev.

Russia will never solve its internal weaknesses (a shrinking population, fragmented ethnic minorities, a brain drain and an energy-dependent economy) through foreign conquests.

But it suggests something else:

Five years after the fall of the Islamic State group’s so-called caliphate in northern Iraq and Syria, the group and its offshoots are far from gone.

From 9,000 fighters Hardened members of the Islamic State are held captive in several camps in Syria, guarded by Kurdish forces with American assistance (which Donald Trump has tried to put an end to).

The Islamic State branch blamed for the Moscow attacks is estimated to have up to 6,000 fighters, mostly in Afghanistan.

Other Islamic State affiliates operate across Africa, where U.S. counterterrorism efforts are hampered by local unrest.

In other words, as Washington retreated from (or was forced to abandon) its efforts to address the global disorder, the disorder grew.

What happened in Moscow is reminiscent of what happened in Moscow Bataclan Theatre of Paris in 2015, where 90 people were killed.

The Islamic State group appears to have a fondness for concert halls.

The word “pivot” is used a lot in foreign policy debates, such as the “pivot to Asia” of the Obama administration or the “pivot to great power competition” under Trump and President Joe Biden.

But if the lesson of the first point is that we neglect NATO and European security at our peril, the lesson of the second is that we have fooled ourselves into believing that our Problem of Islamic terrorism has largely been left behind.

As Israel discovered on October 7, a country’s mortal enemies are not tamed or defeated simply because its leaders have other priorities.

The challenge to American security today is global:

a resurgent Islamic State group, a revanchist China, a regionally aggressive Iran, and a Russia where the lines between grandiosity and paranoia have blurred.

Whether what happened in Russia was Islamic terrorism, an FSB conspiracy, or a gruesome combination of both, it bodes badly for us.

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